this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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TIL the middle class is part of the 1%
They aren't, that's the whole point.
Sorry, I may have misunderstood that. What you meant was they ARE part of the 99% but they don’t consider themselves that way, correct?
If we're going by the historical use of the term, yes.
At the beginning of the early modern period, you had two classes: peasants and aristocrats. You were born into your class and that was that. But early industrialization lead to a funny thing; people who were born peasants, yet through owning things like mines or factories, had amassed enough wealth to rival (and sometimes surpass) the aristocracy. Aristocrats derisively refereed to these wealthy peasants as "The Middle Class".
If you were to show an aristocrat our present world, they'd tell you we're ruled by their middle class.
IDK, I think that's a bit of an oversimplification. Not everyone was either an aristocrat or a peasant, there were also tradespeople, craftsmen, innkeepers, merchants, traders, bankers, and of course the clergy (who would often wield enormous power themselves, even over the aristocrats, because they generally had to give their blessing to whatever the rulers decided to do).
None of these really fit neatly into the peasant/aristocrat dichotomy (except perhaps for the clergy), but I suppose one could lump the rest of them all in together and call them middle class (or townsfolk). Not all of them were rich, of course (in fact, many were probably not), but some of them did quite well for themselves.
Clergy is the one I would say most breaks the dichotomy.
All the others listed still lack the title and privileges that come with nobility. There is some nuance I skipped over: different laws for urban citizens vs rural peasants. But a peasant could become an urban citizen by fleeing their land and living in a city for a year and a day, after which their former lord could no longer claim them.
The middle-class makes up the US's "breadbasket" of political capital, they are the ones with homes, money and credit cards and they are the fatty, crispy pork-back that every oligarch and political leader eye with hunger. They are largely liberal and largely out-of-touch and vote with completely tuned-out ambivalence on most issues. (Read up on exit polling for the 2024 election, it's WILD how people made their decisions and how little they actually understood about the election and candidates.)
The user above is saying that the meme should be pointing out that this 99% (approximately) are the ones who should be alerted to the fact that they're being fleeced, not just people below the poverty line. People view "the poor" as dirty hobos, not people who work 7 days a week.
This ENTIRE political WWE theater we're subjected to with right-versus-left has been fabricated to keep people distracted and occupied so they don't notice the liches and necromancers pulling society's strings in the background. We need to do better to turn this into a class-war and not a fight over trying to yell at conservatives for being ideologically inconsistent. Some fights you can win, some you can't.